Facebook is the fastest growing online social networking forum around, so if you want to be cool in Istanbul you’d better jump on the bandwidth wagon and become a part of the procrastination revolution.
Facebook fever is sweeping all in its path as what was once a student networking tool has gone extra-extracurricular and been embraced by young and not-that-young (perhaps-even-bordering-on-creepy) alike. Our need to see and be seen has now been appropriated, exploited and intuitively packaged into a single website which serves as a sort of adult playpen where you get your own page in which you can upload movies and photos of yourself, indulge in all sorts of amusing games, send messages back and forth, pry into your friends’ lives, list everything in the world you like to do, and avoid the odd stalker, or stalk the odd avoider. The party is now literally in your face and all your friends are there to partake in a non-stop virtual ego orgy in which everyone is their own star.
At first you’d be excused for wondering why insular cliques of socializers who yo-yo along the Otto-Lucca-Leila axis, and who generally attend all the same concerts and art openings anyway, would need additional incentive to waste more time together. But that would be to overlook what Facebook really stands for, because the universal embrace of Facebook is actually indicative of a much more significant phenomenon than just making and maintaining friendships: it’s nothing less than a white-collar workers’ revolt against the mind-numbing soul-draining life-wasting inhumanity of the eight-hour workday that forces hordes of innocent people to spend half their lives sitting in front of a computer monitor staring at Excel spreadsheets. It’s nothing short of a procrastinarian revolution that has enabled Facebooking drones around the world to find some respite and claim some semblance of pleasure from an entire day spent in a cubicle.
The official Facebook motto would have you believe that their site is a social community where friendships are strengthened and myeh myeh myeh. In fact Facebook serves no such purpose, because friendships don’t get stronger when someone sends someone else a vampire bite or a smiling blue elephant – if anything, it just makes the friendship more questionable. Instead, Facebook’s real function is to streamline the utilization of existing friendships so as to provide a means of perking up your libido and stoking your vanity while sating your compulsion to voyeurism and exhibitionism with the aim of ameliorating the pointless meaningless quotidian drudgery of sitting at a desk in a stuffy air-conditioned office surrounded by a bunch of annoying co-workers as you watch your youth slip through your fingers with every Powerpoint presentation you have to prepare for your idiot boss and antediluvian board of directors. In other words, Facebook is sort of an online daycare center where you can drop the real You off to play with your friends while the fake serious work You continues the menial chores necessary to pay the rent.
After all, where do you think people are when they send pink starfishes to each other’s Facebook aquarium? At home? Think again. Who wastes time at home Facebook-fighting friends over teddy bear icons while sending cutesy happy hour drink gifts that you can’t even scratch and sniff let alone drink, when you could instead be spending your inter-officehell time getting sauced on a real drink that can actually get you obliterated so you can forget the pain of your humdrum existence for a few hours and mercifully pass out on the couch in front of the TV instead of crying yourself to sleep every night on a tear-soaked salt-stained pillow?
That’s right comrades, Facebook is a white-collar procrastarian uprising against the crime that is wage-labor and the 40-hour workweek. Every time you send someone a Talking Smiley of a little monkey with a banana, you’re saying FUCK YOU! to the system. Every time you become Fluff Friends with someone who sends you an adorable little squirrel that says it’s a rockstar, you’re fighting the power. Every time you read your Fortune Cookie on someone’s Fun Wall, whenever you grow a gift egg that hatches a penguin, every minute your mystery seed sprouts into a magnolia, or any time you Superpoke someone you’ve been wanting to super pork for a long time, you may as well be manning the barricades at the Paris Commune in 1871, chanting the Marseillaise as you hold off the royalist scum and every other blackguard trying to make a buck off your back.
It’s time to throw off our shackles. After all, we have nothing to lose but our paychecks. So reset your profile picture, update your status (again), join the group Lovers of Cirque du Soleil, check up on your Japanese word of the day, send a Sticky Message to someone’s Super Wall with a kiss icon and a cuddly alien, review your Where I’ve Been map to finally include Cincinnati after much deliberation, let everyone know whether you’ll be attending a concert at Babylon featuring some throat-singing percussion octet of midgets from Zanzibar called TspoomZ, and wait… Do you hear it? That’s the sound of millions of index fingers clicking their mice in unison to the tap-tappity-tapping keyboards of the rising urban procrastinariate revolution.
Workers of the world, send a Unite! icon as a gift for $1!
